Anthropic has signed a $10 billion, six-year cloud computing agreement with AI cloud startup Volta, according to a report from Bloomberg citing people familiar with the matter. The deal was said to involve Bitdeer, a crypto-mining company partnering with Volta to build a data center in Norway with 133 megawatts of capacity. The facility is expected to run on Nvidia’s Vera Rubin chip architecture, and Volta is reportedly part of Nvidia’s Cloud Partner program. Anthropic was said to have not yet responded to requests for comment on the deal, which follows recent compute agreements with SpaceX and Amazon.
Separately, Business Insider reported that Anthropic is building an internal team to design custom AI chips, aiming to co-design hardware and models for greater efficiency. The move follows earlier reporting from The Information that Anthropic had discussed a potential chip manufacturing partnership with Samsung. Anthropic currently relies on hardware deals with AWS, Google, Nvidia, and AMD, but rising demand for its Claude models was said to be driving the push toward proprietary silicon.
The company joins other AI labs pursuing custom chips: OpenAI unveiled a Broadcom-built chip in June, Google DeepMind uses Alphabet’s TPUs, and Meta has developed its own MTIA accelerators. Anthropic is said to be hiring engineers for a new custom silicon team, though the company did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
